1. Field of the invention
The present invention pertains to the management systems of storage area networks (hereafter referred to as SAN) that join several servers and several storage devices using fiber channel networks.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, the capacity of single storage systems has increased and they now need to be able to function with several different types of servers. Also, with the advent of the widespread use of fiber channels, which can transfer data in parallel along data transfer routes at high speeds and among several host computers, it is expected that the scale of the connection format of storage systems is going to become even larger in this environment.
Joining several servers and several storage devices together in this way is referred to as a storage area network (hereafter referred to as a SAN) and attempts are being made to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) or manage the storage needs of several servers that are increasingly dispersed.
Be that as it may, however, there are some problems that require solving in the areas of security and the management of regions on a storage device.
One of these problems is that it is possible for data in one storage device that is being used by one host to be inadvertently destroyed by another host when a SAN is made up of several host computers (hereafter referred to as hosts) and several storage systems. This is because all of the hosts are capable of accessing all of the storage systems.
At present there are no perfect solutions to the problems of managing regions in storage systems or security. Moreover, when there is a problem with one of the many devices making up a SAN, many different error reports are sent to the system administrator, making it difficult to pinpoint an affected area and resulting in no real method for doing so.
Several terms used herein are well known in the art. More particularly, SAN (storage area network), FCA (fiber channel adapter), HBA (host bus adapter), WWN (world wide name), PID (port identification), and TCO (total cost of ownership) are terms which are well known in the art.